Four For Friday: How HR Can Avoid Missing Out with Analytics

Michael Altiero November 20, 2015

Every Friday, The DDR shines a light on the best data-centric articles and resources from across the internet, social media, and industry.

Seeing a return on investment is crucial to every business function. Not seeing positive returns can spell the end to a once promising idea or project. For an HR team getting ready to adopt analytics, what can be done to avoid missing out on a return? It’s an important question, especially as many HR teams aren’t even sure what to do with data analytics in the first place. The articles in this week’s Four For Friday address this question and more.

“Today, and estimated 60% of companies are investing in big data and analytics tools to help make their HR departments more data-driven, yet only 4% of companies have achieved the capability to use data to make predictions,” says author John Maguire. Citing Leslie Breackell, client engagement leader for Australia and New Zealand at IBM Smarter Workforce, the following are five ways that HR teams could be missing out by not using analytics:

“Information management enables the merging and integrating of data sources seamlessly across the HR function.”

“Visualizations allow HR leaders to present information with impact.”

“Cloud-based computing has enabled HR analytics to be accessible to broad audiences, with appropriate data-set restrictions by user.”

“Natural language interfaces now make the power of analytics available to those who are not trained in computer programming, enabling HR functions to analyze both structured and unstructured HR data.”

According to Tim Sackett, President of HRU Technical Resources, employee turnover is one of those topics that are generally off-limits for workplace conversations. We don’t discuss it “because we believe we don’t have any control over it. It’s just one of those things that happens in organizational dynamics,” says Tim. So how can you improve your employee turnover? These 4 steps should help:

“For HR, analytics are a clear path to stronger executive influence as an “anticipator” rather than a “reactor” or “partner,” and “future-oriented” is the most notable characteristic of HR data seen by senior business partners as valuable and ideal (even more so than “relevant” or “frequent”),” says Evan Sinar, Chief Scientist and director of DDI’s Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research. He goes on to provide both near-term and long-term outcomes for those who effectively use analytics in HR. Read Evan’s article to learn about each and how they can help your HR team.

In an interview with Luk Smeyers, Co-Founder and CEO of iNostix, the focus is on how HR should stop just reporting on the past, but also start using HR analytics to predict future outcomes. One way of doing this is by using risk scoring. “Risk scoring can go very far: blind spots in the organization that deserve attention, risks in terms of staff turnover, absenteeism and accidents, but also dysfunctional leadership that might make a company take too big risks or even studying the risks of unbalanced salary structures that could encourage mismanagement,” says Luk. Check out the rest of Luk’s interview in this post from the iNostix blog.